cushions, cojines, with cojones). I told her about the time I led
a silent yoga and meditation retreat with my screaming four-
month-old son in a front pack, my milk letting down and soak-
ing my camisole as I guided the retreatants into savasana.
A flurry of emails later, Shawn was sitting at my kitchen table
in California—along with her husband, her son, her daughter,
and her daughter’s best friend. She was handing
me the keys to her house and
instructing me on how to
operate her Persian blinds and
put her cat’s bowl in a moat
of water so the ants wouldn’t
infest it.
Soon I was doing a seated
twist on Shawn’s terracotta
patio, looking over a valley
of rooftops and orange-blos-
somed trees to the Mediterra-
nean Sea. Teja, Skye, and I were
swapping houses with Shawn
and her family for the month.
TRAVEL WRITER Bill Bryson said
that the great gift of travel is that it puts you in situations where
you can’t take anything for granted. Like meditation, it cultivates
a beginner’s mind in which each experience is fresh.
A house swap, in particular, invites the tantalizing fantasy that
you’re leaving behind not just your own familiar routine but also
your own familiar and slightly annoying self. You’re swapping it
out for a new, improved, more fascinating self, with better outfits
and a better shot at enlightenment. Dropped into the middle of
another woman’s life—sleeping in her bed with her mosquito
coil humming, riding her bicycle to the beach while wearing her
(only slightly too small) flip-flops, sautéing zucchini from her
garden in her kitchen—I felt, at first, as if I’d been reincarnated.
Our first evening in Sitges, a friend of Shawn’s invited me and
Skye to a fiesta de espuma (foam festival) in a nearby village. It
was a giant public bubble bath, in which a cannon mounted on
top of a truck fired a stream of soapy foam into a plaza next to
a seventeenth-century church, while a salsa band played with no
shirts on. Children in bathing suits and goggles, wrinkled abueli-
tas hand in hand with their grandkids, and papas with toddlers
seated on their shoulders all frolicked in neck-deep bubbles to
a Latin beat. Skye danced through the crowd with a corona of
bubbles, shaking his frothy hips and waving his arms.
The next day, Skye, Teja, and I took the train into Barcelona
for a bicycle tour through fifteenth-century streets jammed
with honking, fuming, twenty-first-century traffic. We ped-
aled through the medieval courtyard where Ferdinand and
Isabella greeted Christopher Columbus on his return from the
New World. We cruised past the sandcastle-like splendor of the
still-unfinished masterwork cathedral of the architect Antoni
Gaudí. We paused for power bars and water at a series of memo-
rials commemorating religious and political martyrs who over
the centuries had been shot or burned at the stake or rolled
through the streets in barrels full of broken glass.
But it wasn’t just soap bubbles and touristy photo ops that
brushed the cobwebs of famil-
iarity from my eyes. In a foreign
country, ordinary life—buying
groceries, doing laundry, driv-
ing Skye to and from his beach
camp in Shawn’s old VW van—
was a constant mystery. I blun-
dered through my days, bleat-
ing the primal phrases from my
introductory Spanish CDs—
“I want... I need... Do you
have... ?”—and misunderstand-
ing the answers. A freeway sign
flashed “peligro,” which I knew
meant “danger.” But I couldn’t
understand the rest of the
warning, which, in any case, quickly disappeared behind me.
Why was the old woman at the roadside fruit stand so irritated
that I’d picked up the melon and set it on the weighing scale?
Why were the carts in the Supermarque chain-locked together,
and how did I get them apart? For that one, I sent Skye to inquire
in Spanish of the white-coated man at the meat counter—who
was standing next to an entire pig, skinned and gutted, dangling
by its hind ankles from an overhead hook. (We learned that veg-
etarianism was a rare phenomenon in Spain when we requested
our salads sin carne—without meat—and they came with ham
instead.) In the U.S., meat came tidily packaged in plastic, its
animal origins coyly disguised. In Spain, it stared right at us and
said, Hi, I’m Wilbur and I’ll be your tapas for this evening...
Alas, it quickly became clear that I had not been reborn into
this new reality as an entirely new person—as, for example, a
person who didn’t get snippy when her partner played classical
guitar till after midnight, slept in till ten, and then drank strong
Spanish coffee from a two-liter measuring cup, even though she
had repeatedly told him that the best way to get over jet lag was
to get up at dawn and do yoga and meditate with her, and even
though she was clearly so right about that! Unfortunately, I had
packed my mind along with me—as opinionated and prolific
as always.
A few days into our trip, I stayed home all morning to practice
yoga on Shawn’s patio. A garbage truck groaned up the street,
with a sound like a very large animal in labor, but the breeze
smelled of salt water and orange blossoms. As I dropped into
the pause at the bottom of a long exhalation, I thought, Now I’m
finally here.
PHOTOBYANNECUSHMAN
➢
SHAMBHALA SUN JANUARY 2013
30